Growing Up Kunstler

It’s 1980s New York City. Ed Koch is mayor. Violent crime is rampant. And your dad’s a flamboyant defense lawyer who takes on the most frenzied, high profile criminal cases around: The guy who killed all those cops in the Bronx? The "wolf pack" of black kids who raped a white jogger in Central Park? The Muslim militant who murdered a radical Israeli rabbi? Yeah, that’s your dad on TV defending those guys. Oh—and that last one? That one brought out the protestors. They came to your house, picketed your front door, shot out your windows with red paint pellets, called your dad an enemy of America. They called him a self-hating Jew. Your dad, they told you—your dad has got to go.

This was life for Emily and Sarah Kunstler, who’ve distilled these experiences and more into a fascinating documentary just released on DVD about their father, William Kunstler. The film, Disturbing the Universe, is part memoir, part career retrospective: It’s as much about their own strange experiences growing up as the iconoclast’s daughters as it is a look at Kunstler’s innovative, theatrical style of lawyering and his contributions to revolutionary causes—causes that, prior to his becoming a criminal lawyer in New York City, included defending the Chicago Seven, the American Indian Movement, the Freedom Riders, and the Attica inmates, among others.

There’s a lot that makes this a damn fine film. We hear about the life and times of William Kunstler from a massive cast of radical left icons, celeb journalists, and lawyers—among them Jimmy Breslin, Ron Kuby, Alan Dershowitz, Harry Belafonte, Bobby Seale and Tom Hayden. Even better are the people transformed by the defining moments Kunstler was so intimately involved with: A prison guard from Attica who was shot four times during the siege that Kunstler’s negotiations were attempting to avoid. A juror on the Chicago Seven case who explains how she’d once been a government-trusting Republican, but that what she witnessed during the trial changed her.

Yet what makes the film so powerful is that it’s not simply a fawning portrayal of a New Left icon—it’s a reckoning. Sarah and Emily Kunslter were skeptical of their dad—at least of the dad they knew growing up. They rarely got see Mr. Civil Rights Hero defending the oppressed and the victimized—that all came before he settled down in New York. The dad they knew was the one who defended rapists, terrorists and cop-killers, the guy who thrived on media attention and appeared regularly on Phil Donahue, the guy who talked about righteousness but seemed to have lost his way. "Dad taught us to always stand up to injustice," Emily says at the beginning of the film. "But at some point, he stopped standing for anything worth fighting for."

In one of the movie’s oddest, most striking scenes, Kunstler and his two daughters are on a talk show on NY1 News, apparently to discuss this lack of integrity in full public view. The girls were teenagers at the time, and their dad has just given a very lawyerly answer to a question about whether or not he regretted some of his cases. Both girls waste no time saying they’d never want to be lawyers. So the host asks, "Well if you’re both committed to changing things—if you’re not lawyers, what do you think is the best vehicle to do that?" "Well, some people act and some people defend them," Sarah replies. "Maybe we’re just people of action."

In the end, Kunstler made decisions that his daughters would never understand. Despite these disappointments, Sarah and Emily did their dad right with this film: They remembered him not as a one-dimensional folk hero, but as a man of complicated motivations and legendary talent, a man who was both righteous and human, compassionate and shameless.

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